Bad Habits
by The Pen-Wielding Gunslinger
Summary: Everyone has their pet peeves. The problem is controlling yourself when people decide to wave their bad habits in your face. Big metal fists deal far more damage than the tiny hands of a small, unhappy child.
1. Midnight

**Bad Habits**

* * *

The call came at midnight, waking Len Woods from a sound sleep. Moaning, he plucked the heavy phone off its receiver. "Yeah?"

"Mister Woods?" That voice belonged, he knew even in his confused state, to the night watchman, Dennis Hartford. The nineteen-year-old high school graduate called almost every other night to ask for advice. He was a decent employee, though everyone among the Fazbear Entertainment higher-ups knew the night watchman was just a honeypot anyway. They went through between four and eleven in a month, and the survival rate had actually risen to an admirable sixty percent. The only one to survive an entire month and leave with her life had been the Snipes girl. Len, who had picked up a rather gruesome talent of choosing night watchmen, was deeply ambivalent about the boy. He had good reflexes and pattern recognition, but the constant calls seemed to speak to a lack of confidence that had not been present during his interview. Tonight, his typical nervousness had escalated—his trembling voice sounded mere inches from tears.

"Dennis?" Len sat up in bed. The heart beating beneath his massive left breast suddenly clenched. Sweat broke out along his forehead and the hollows of his temples. "Dennis, what's up? Did—did one of them get out?"

"No." His voice broke. Len's heart jumped. "It's so much worse." And Dennis Hartford, the pinnacle of nineteen-year-old male humanity, broke down and began to cry.

)-(

In the end it was Len, with his little black book, who had to make all the calls. First to Dominique and Richie, the cleaning staff. He gave them the day off, no big deal, no fucking problem. He had been fine through both of those calls, but after hanging up with an irate but grateful Dominique, a sudden fit of shivering overtook him. He sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his lap, waiting for his shakes to subside. Oh, this was bad. This was so, so bad. He had _told_ them, each and every one of them, but did _any_ of the employees ever _listen_?

He called Jack Dixon, the early-morning security guard.

"Yeah?" Jack yawned thickly into the phone. "Who the _fuck_ is this?"

"It's Len Woods."

"What?! It's… 1:02 in the morning, Len!"

"Is it?" He glanced at the sunburst clock on the wall. Had it really only been an hour since the call? "Look, Jack, I need you to come in this morning."

It's _Saturday_ , Len! I—"

"I know what goddamn day it is!" he snapped, silencing all further protests.

There was a pause. "…. How bad is it, Len?" Jack asked him.

His heart jolted again; he grunted, thumping his chest with a clammy, clenched fist. The world swam in front of his vision; the corners of the furniture around the room seemed to be melting into smeary shades of black and gray. His pulse thudded heavily in his temples like the world's biggest bass drum. How bad? How bad? It was a _nightmare_ , a nightmare he could not wake up from, and the sweat pooling around him in his deep bed stung like acid—

"Len? Len!" Jack's voice echoed to him from the end of a long tunnel. "Jesus! How. _Bad_. Is it?!"

"It's bad." His voice was weak and fainting. He renewed his grip on the phone, so tight his jagged fingernails dug into the sensitive meat of his hand, and the world abruptly snapped back into focus. No time to panic right now until the business had been solved. "It's two, this time."

Another pause, the space of five heavy heartbeats. "Two? How?"

Len closed his eyes. Strange patterns swam behind his eyelids, black on black. "Just get over there at six."

"Will do." He hung up.

Len, knowing that Jack would not sleep again that night and not caring, went to take a pill and find a pack of cigarettes.

)-(

At 6:02 AM, Jack's aged Buick pulled up into the Fazbear Pizzeria parking lot. Besides Len's Corvette, there was only one other car in the lot: a white coupe with a pink crystal hanging from the rearview mirror. The seat covers were pink and monogramed with giant silver C's. Jack glanced at it as he got out. "Whose is that?"

"No idea."" He gritted his teeth. "Let's find the kid." He walked up to the front doors and hauled them open.

A body collapsed into Len's arms. He bellowed with surprise as he lifted the dead weight. The body wore a Freddy Fazbear head and a security badge. Sweat had darkened the back of his blue shirt all the way down to his belt, though frost touched the windows and coated the parking lot. "Dennis!" he roared.

It was then that Len realized the kid was alive, sobbing as he clung to Len's arms. "Oh Jesus Len!" he babbled. His body felt feverishly warm even through Len's jacket. When he tried to find his feet, he only succeeded in slipping on the slick pavement. Twin trails of white steamed from the nose-holes like smoke. Len hauled him up. "Oh Jesus oh God oh—"

He gave the boy a shake. "Take that fucking thing off." Looking at his scared, glistening blue eyes through the eyeholes of the mask made him feel ill.

The boy took off the head and grabbed Len again. His own hair stood up in wild, sweaty blond spikes. "Thank God you're here!" he cried in a shrill voice that echoed through the early-morning stillness of the parking lot.

"Yeah. I'm so fucking excited to be here." He peeled the boy's hands off his arms while Jack watched in bemusement. "Come on, let's go see the damage."

)-(

Dennis was right. It was bad.

There was blood grimed into the carpet, blood splashed on the thin vinyl tablecloths, blood splattered on the wall in wavery fan shapes. Clots of something that looked like oatmeal but wasn't covered the floor. His helpless eye roved over it all. New carpet for sure, _again_ , oh, that would cost a fortune. As for the bodies, well…

He looked at one of the corpses lying on the floor. Oh, fuck. She was gorgeous, or had been. Now her face was a swollen mass of purpling meat covered in drying gore. Her chest was sunken in like a bowl, shattered ribs tearing through the thin fabric of her shirt. Her legs were twisted into inhuman contortions, and shards of bone pierced the skin. Some titanic force had crushed her body and snapped her legs as easily as twigs. Disturbingly, he could still see that they had once been long and shapely. She wore a skirt that cost more than Len cared to imagine. It was hiked up around her thighs in a torrent of pink fabric. One of her heels had fallen off; it lay beside the stage like discarded trash. The toe of the shoe was red with dried blood.

"Jesus," said Jack softly. "It's a slaughterhouse."

Dennis hastily covered his mouth and ran off to the bathroom. Len resisted the urge to join him. He had seen a few bodies here like this, though none this extreme.

"Len."

He looked up. The dayshift guard had arrived—Malkovich, or Berkowitz, or some fucking thing. He stood looking at the wreckage with his hands on his slim hips. "Jesus, what are _you_ doing here?!"

"You asked me to come out, Mister Woods." His features assumed a puzzled expression.

"Did I?" He could not remember doing so. Strange… Malkovich-or-Berkowitz always seemed to be around during disasters. He had his own gruesome talent: knowing when the pizzeria turned into the sight of a massacre.

"You woke me up at two, told me to get my butt down here. This is one heck of a situation, Mister Woods."

"Tell me about it, Manischewitz."

Malkovich-or-Berkowitz blinked. "Manischewitz, sir?"

Len waved a dismissive hand, grunting. This guy gave him the fucking creeps, whatever his fucking name was. He always seemed so… cheerful and innocent. No one should be this chipper at the scene of a double homicide… though he couldn't exactly say it was homicide. Animatronics could not commit murder. His eyes roved to the animatronics onstage. The blood was there, too, along with some blonde hairs and something that might have been a smashed eyeball ground into hamburger meat. Oh, fuck. His stomach lurched.

"Are you all right, Sir?"

"Fine, fine." He could not tear his eyes from the sight of the dead girl's blonde hair and brains clotted and dried onto the hands of one of the animatronics… the chicken, creepy little thing. "Let's go find out what happened."

"Does it really matter, Sir?" Malkovich-or-Berkowitz asked nervously, following in Len's wake. He delicately skirted the corpse dressed in a security guard uniform. The remains of a badge still glinted on his shattered chest. "Poor Kyle."

Len grunted and ducked into the dim security room. It had not been disturbed. Kyle's jacket was not slung over the chair. He had probably not even stepped foot in here… meaning he would be on the security cameras. Len rewound the tape in the VCR, turned on the monitor, and hit the playback button. The screen flickered on. Malkovich-or-Berkowitz leaned close, his eyes intent on the scene that unfolded.


	2. 6 PM

**Chapter 2: Six PM, Friday Night**

It had just been a throwaway idea, a stupid result of too much pot on a Friday afternoon, but once Cassy Miller decided she would do something no one could sway her. She dragged her boyfriend out of the apartment, to her car, and peeled out of the parking lot with a screech of her tires.

"Cass. This is a bad idea."

"No, it's a _great_ idea." She turned on the radio, found a station she liked, and proceeded to scream along to the horrible noise.

Kyle hesitated. "I _really_ —"

She flashed that look at him, the one that said _I'm an inch from screaming at you so watch what the fuck you say_. He tried again. "It's just, company policy says I'm not supposed to let anybody in."

She huffed. "Oh, come on. It's just a quick visit. Come on! I wanna see!"

He hesitated, and she set a hand on his thigh. "Come on. It's just a little peek. Nothing's gonna happen! I'm not, like, going to burn the place down. Just a peek!"

He gave in. "Okay, babe. Whatever you want."

She nodded, pleased. Her hand tightened on his thigh. Sweat broke out on his forehead. "You've done me a favor... now. What can I do to repay you?"

They arrived ten minutes late for Kyle's shift, but what the hell. The dayshift guy would be fine. He _looked_ pretty pissed, though, standing in the parking lot with the collar of his jacket turned up. "You ass," he grumbled. "What the fuck?" He took one look at Kyle, and then his girlfriend, and grimaced. They smelled like sex.

"It's just ten minutes. You're fine."

"Do you think _maybe_ I had something to _do_ instead of waiting for you?!"

"It's not like _you_ have plans," Kyle retorted. The dayshift guy never had plans that Kyle could remember. He spent all of his time at this stupid pizzeria anyway.

"Maybe I did!"

"Yeah? I bet you've never even _been_ on a date." That was Cassy at her snottiest, with a hand on her hip and a defiant jut to her chin. Sometimes she could be such a bitch, but Kyle loved her anyway.

"You don't fucking know that!" he snapped back.

Kyle stared. This was weird. The guy was trembling like a live wire. Usually, he couldn't be coaxed to a state more active than apathetic. "Calm down, dude." He brushed past the seething guard and headed inside the dim pizzeria to put his coat away and clock in.

Cassy followed a moment later, rubbing her tightly-crossed arms. "That guy said the weirdest thing to me when I came in."

Her troubled expression surprised Kyle. Cassy was one to fire back at anyone who disturbed her day-to-day routine. For her to display any kind of disquiet bordered on the insane.

"Yeah?" His fingers paused in the middle of pulling down the zipper of his insulated security jacket. "What?"

One perfectly-manicured hand came up to rub the curve of her neck. It slid over the faint hickey marks along her skin with no hesitation. "He said he liked my legs."

Kyle blinked. The dayshift guy liked her legs? So? Everyone liked her legs. Kyle liked her legs. Kyle _worshipped_ those legs, and what they could do. Cassy was hot as hell. She should be used to compliments like that. "Uhhh..."

"He said he liked how smooth they are. And skinny. Like a child's."

A shiver slid up Kyle's spine. "Aw, man, that's heavy shit."

She nodded.

A silence fell. To Kyle, the silence seemed larger than the sum of the words they had spoken... it seemed to be all the words they wanted to say, could not say. Fears. Half-baked accusations. Horrible, dawning hunches. What kind of man said something like that, especially about another man's girlfriend? A pedo? Just a creep? Did the comment have more of a meaning than his half-baked brain could comprehend? Was all of this just a result of stoned paranoia? Was it—

Cassy was speaking. He shook his head, clearing it. "Huh?"

"I said, _so_ , this is the place." She looked around. Plastic tablecloths. Pictures and posters on the walls. Cheap carpet. And the robots, of course. Three onstage, the other lurking behind the curtain. Soon, everyone would be able to see it. The carpet would grow thin with the hundreds of children's feet racing across it. The smell of greasy cardboard and cigarettes would permeate the air and absorb into the walls. For now, it belonged to Cassandra Jane Miller, America's answer to the princesses of England, alone. A sickening, powerful triumph rose up in her, tainted by disgusts. Did she _want_ to be the princess of a shoddy, Day-Glo kingdom with such a shitty reputation?

Kyle touched her arm, jerking her away from her bizarre daydreams. "You've gotta go," he said.

She flashed that patented look at him again, the one that would normally make him cower. But This was his _job_ , dammit—she would get over being mad when he bought more pot with the money he earned from _this job._

"I just want a look!" she said indignantly. "God, Kyle, I'm not going to _break_ anything!"

"I know..." He squirmed, shifting from foot to foot like a kid with a full bladder.

She huffed, aware that she had already won. Kyle was a jellyfish. She leaned in to squint up at one of the robots. "These things are creepy."

"Less creepy than the old ones." He glanced at them. They _were_ creepy, with their plastic faces and frozen expressions of joy. It was as if they were expressing a manic happiness they did not feel. But of course, that was his altered state talking—they _didn't_ feel that joy. They were robots! They felt nothing! They didn't have _souls._

Cassy, incredibly, lit up a cigarette. Before Kyle could even think to speak through his shock, she had snapped her lighter closed and taken a deep drag. "Jesus, Cass! There's _kids_ that're gonna play here! This place can't smell like smoke before it opens!"

"Chill." She released her held-in breath, head tilted upward. A trail of smoke jetted out from between her pouty pink lips, drifting up and over to the animatronics. As he watched, horrified, the smoke ghosted against Chica's face. He had a moment almost hallucinatory in its clarity—the smoke, sliding up into Chica's giant plastic head, over one of her fake eyeballs, into the circuits that made up her brain like creeping fingers.

"What're you doing?!"

She rolled her eyes. "No one's gonna know."

"The place will smell like smoke!" he protested, but quietly... very quietly.

"It'll be _fine_ , Kyle! God, you're such a control freak." She rolled her eyes again. "Chica isn't gonna mind. She's a chill bird. Aren't you, Chica?" She laughed, blowing smoke directly into the bird's face.

Kyle sensed the disaster before it happened. He had only half a second to feel a thrill of horror tear through his gut before Cass fell, blood bursting from her face. She spun, stumbling in her heels. He caught a glimpse of her face. Her entire nose had shifted sideways, mashed against her cheek like something made out of clay.

Chica's metal foot pistoned outward, catching the backs of Cassy's legs as she fell. She collapsed on her belly with a muffled cry. It all happened so quickly. Five seconds, an eternity. Kyle stood paralyzed as Chica stepped on the stage and stamped on the back of Cass's spine. Blood gushed from the girl's mouth like a fountain. Her fingernails carved ragged holes in the carpet. Stifled snaps reached Kyle's ears: the sounds of Cassy's ribs giving way.

His paralysis broke. He ran to Chica and pushed hard with both hands in the center of her chest. The heavy robot rocked back on her feet with a tinny scream, stumbling over the uneven landscape of Cassy's dying frame. There was a second of breathless pause while she struggled to stay upright.

Kyle turned. It was like swimming through the air, the slow and dreamy movement of a nightmare. He did not try to help Cassy—if she wasn't dead yet, she would be soon. Everything except the need to survive had been stripped away in blinding panic. He ran to the door. Ten feet away, a hundred miles to his mind. Nine. Eight. Something pulled at the back of his shirt. The purr of ripping fabric broke through his internal chaos. His feet stuttered, caught in a chair. He was pulled back, running in midair like a character in one of the cartoons he used to watch with Cass. Cartoons like this. They were funny, sure, and sometimes scary, but they were only fantasy...

A flash of insight occurred to him, and he spoke it aloud.

"This is all a dream."

Chica turned him around. There was blood on her plastic face, blood on her eyeballs, her frozen smile (but that smile looked more like a scream now, a scream turned upside down). There was a chunk of white stuff like oatmeal stuck to her teeth. Kyle observed it all with a detached, dazed expression. "This is a dream."

Chica threw him, hard and far. He hit the wall with a graceless thump, collapsing on the floor in a heap. "A dream..."

A foot sank into his stomach. Pain exploded there. This wasn't a dream. It wasn't a dream at all.

Big plastic hands descended upon his face.

Kyle died screaming.


	3. 6:12 AM

**Chapter 3: 6:12 AM, Saturday Morning**

Len vomited all over the floor. Chunks of his early-morning breakfast of whiskey and eggs splattered his shoes. Mani-whatever winced and stepped back, a look of delicate disgust on his face. Jack looked pale himself. He glanced at the cigarettes in his breast pocket. A shudder of revulsion passed through him. He tossed the nearly-full pack in the garbage, handling them as one would handle a dead rat instead of an innocuous pack of Premiums.

"What do we do now?" Manischewitz asked.

"We clean," was Len's response. His heart thudded thickly in his throat. The world washed in and out of focus. "But first, I think I need to go to the hospital."

Len lived through the heart attack.

He had to take a few days off, and his doctor suggested an operation, but at least he lived. He spent a week in the hospital. Every night, when he closed his eyes, he saw Kyle's mangled face, twisted into wordless accusation.

As he lay on the operating table, closed eyes twitching, as doctors whose forms wavered in reflections on the watery gray tiles surrounded him in a hungry circle of metal and masks, Jack and Manischewitz tended to the corpses. Though Len wasn't there, he felt as though his spirit had torn away from its tenuous grip on his overtaxed body and floated off, through miles of darkness, to join them in cleanup as he always had. He saw them push the bodies into the makeshift incinerator... smelled the sweet honey of their roasting flesh.

Jack and Dennis cleaned the walls. They washed the tables. Replaced the carpet. Soon, no trace of Cassy and Kyle remained, especially after the three of them rolled the car into a lake. Before the car could take on water in earnest, Manischewitz slipped the pink crystal off her rearview mirror and pocketed it.

"Why did you do that?" Jack asked him. Manischewitz didn't know.

The night before Len was released, he awoke from a horrible dream, convinced that Chica was standing in the corner, waiting for him to look over at her so she could strike, and mash his face into hamburger just like she had done to the poor kids. When he looked over to the phone, meaning to call the nurse, he spied Cassy's pink crystal hanging on the lamp. He did not sleep at all for the rest of the night.

The next morning he left the hospital, followed by his anxious daughter. "Are you going to be all right, Daddy?" she asked him. Dear, sweet Ann, so completely unaware of everything. "You could stay with us for a few days."

Len decided that would be a fine idea. "I'll be okay," he told Ann. "But yeah. It'll be nice to see my grandkids."

She smiled. "Dad, what's with the trinket? I've never seen you carry jewelry."

"It's not mine," he answered. His hand closed over it. "It's just garbage."

He ended up giving it to one of the grandkids (Christ, Ann and her hubby had kids like rabbits). He smiled back when her face lit up. Ruffled her hair. Tried to forget what it was. Tried to pretend he couldn't see the dead girl's face superimposed over his granddaughter's.

When Len quit his job, he had never felt better. His attitude improved, his cholesterol decreased, his weight steadied out. He took up jogging, paid more regular visits to his kids and grandkids. They were stunned by the complete shift in his lifestyle, but thrilled to spend more time with him... even if sometimes his mind went to places none of them understood, and the shadows he refused to discuss clouded his bright eyes.

His heart did not trouble him again until he died of a massive infarction twenty years later, in front of the television and all of his kids, when Fazbear's Fright burned to the ground. As the world sank into pinkness, and the dreadful coldness swept through his body, he could hear the warped sound of the girl's dying scream.


End file.
